Speaker: Adam Meyer, Owner of Red-tail Roofing

Some roofs are easier to walk on than others. This one’s easy to get around once you get up here, but a much different system than you’ve seen in most of my videos. This is a flat roof on a big commercial building, with this black membrane down here called EPDM, and it’s a ballasted system, meaning it’s got all this rock on it.

That rock is on there to partly protect the EPDM, but mostly to hold it in place, because it’s not actually fastened down, so all this rock is holding it down up here, and at the moment it’s leaking something terrible. So you can see where somebody has moved the rock to try to find those leaks, and, I mean, you’re just chasing all day. You’ve got to move a lot, I mean, tons of rock, literally, to even attempt to find leaks in some of these places, so this kind of system can be very challenging to repair once something has gone wrong.

There’s a lot of maintenance to keep it functioning to its highest level for its full lifetime, and once you get behind on it, it gets pretty tough, but that’s what I’m doing up here today really looking for leaks and getting an idea of how much it would cost to repair and also replace. So, if you have a project where you need several tons of rock, and I do have to replace this roof in the future, let me know. We might be able to work something out.